‘American Pachuco’ Reveals the Life and Legacy of Chicano ‘La Bamba’ Director Luis Valdez

When Luis Valdez first spoke to documentarian David Alvarado, he needed to address his feelings about the negative reception that his evocative play “Zoot Suit,” about Mexican American urban life in Los Angeles, received on Broadway in 1979.

During their initial conversation for the documentary “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” the pioneering Chicano playwright and filmmaker recalled how New York critics like Walter Kerr dismissed “Zoot Suit” with vitriolic incuriosity.  

“I knew that it was more than just artistic judgment that was coming through,” Valdez told IndieWire during a recent video interview from his home in San Juan Bautista, California. “It was a political, racist-inspired vision of my work as a stereotype. They had no willingness to stretch themselves just a little bit.”

Kerr, for example, questioned Valdez’s command of English given his use of Caló, a culturally specific dialect that blends Mexican Spanish slang with English.

“My work has always been bilingual, because I needed the flavor of some Spanish in with the English, because that’s the way Chicanos talk,” Valdez adds. “Una palabra en Español and another one in English. You go back and forth. It’s code-switching.”

In “American Pachuco,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Alvarado treats Valdez’s defiance of his circumstances as the child of migrant farmworkers and his history of political activism through storytelling as a quintessential American narrative.

“We thought about the structure like a protagonist’s journey, like a fiction film or a story that Luis might’ve wrote himself,” said Alvarado, whose previous credits include 2017’s “Bill Nye: Science Guy” and “We Are as Gods” (both co-directed with Jason Sussberg).

Alongside his sister, Alvarado watched Valdez’s 1987 “La Bamba,” a hit biopic on late Mexican-American singer Ritchie Valens, countless times on VHS growing up. He became familiar with Valdez’s work before he became aware of his enduring legacy.

“‘La Bamba’ meant so much to us, not just because it was a story about a Latino family, but because it was also a signal to broader America that this is an American story,” Alvarado said.

‘American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez‘Elizabeth Sunflower / Retro Phot

Years later, at a ceremony for a scholarship award Alvarado won as a college student, Valdez served as keynote speaker. The veteran storyteller shared anecdotes about his humble beginnings, about the founding of El Teatro Campesino, his theater company that created politically charged shows with farmworkers in mind, and his eventual forays into Broadway and Hollywood.

“It was really inspiring for me personally because I don’t come from money or from a family where pursuing the arts is something that’s an obvious play,” Alvarado said. “They were always encouraging, but my dad was like, ‘You should probably go to business school.’”

At the time, Alvarado was a part of a nonprofit organization, and he invited Valdez to show some of his work to the membership, including his 1969 short film “I Am Joaquin,” based on Rodolfo Gonzales’ poem. But it wasn’t until several years after these initial encounters that Alvarado, reflecting on his own career, considered making a documentary about Valdez.

“I remembered meeting Luis, and I was curious, ‘Has anybody made a film about Luis?’” A Google search revealed that, in fact, no one had. “I just sat with that for a couple hours, and I said, ‘Shit, if anybody can do it, I can do it.’ And so, I reached out to him,” Alvarado recalled.

“This was really more a sense of instinct here,” Valdez said about saying yes to Alvarado. “I felt that somehow David was the guy. Also, the years are starting to pile up.”

Besides Valdez’s firsthand accounts, the film features insights from those closest to him, such as his brother Daniel Valdez and his wife, Lupe Trujillo-Valdez, as well as major figures like Dolores Huerta, Cheech Marin, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Taylor Hackford.

“It was an opportunity for me to make a final statement on film — although I’m not ready to quit yet — but to make a definitive statement about what this has been about for the last 60 years. And I think people needed to hear that,” Valdez explained. “People are always in need of inspiration of some kind. And I’ve spent a lot of years just being a motivational speaker reminding people of who we are.” The “we” he speaks of are Latinos in the United States.

Edward James Olmos, an Oscar-nominated actor and a Chicano legend in his own right, narrates the film in character as the ghostly Pachuco, a sharply dressed Chicano unwilling to assimilate to Anglo America, whom Olmos played in “Zoot Suit” decades ago.

“It’s kind of a strange idea for a character from the subject’s work to be aware of the documentary and comment on the work in the documentary and himself at the same time. I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but it was something we experimented with early on,” Alvarado explained.

For Alvarado, the doc had to work for two distinct audiences: those familiar with Valdez and his career, and those ignorant of his significance, which, unfortunately, is most of the U.S.

“To speak to [the first audience] you had to be able to do something that was not just talking down to them about things they already know. I wanted it to be elevated in a way that was new and coming directly from the materials, that it felt like a beautiful new way to look at something they’re familiar with,” he explained about using Olmos’ Pachuco voice.

“It was an intuitive stroke of genius to use the Pachuco as the storyteller of my documentary,” said Valdez. “El Pachuco disarms the Angloness of speaking English. You can speak English, but you don’t have to do it in a totally Anglo kind of way.“

A large portion of the footage Alvarado used to craft his film came from El Teatro Campesino’s archive at UC Santa Barbara. Alvarado and his team digitized 80,000 feet of celluloid after obtaining some funding. “We’re making it available for researchers and other folks through UC Santa Barbara and the Internet Archive,” Alvarado said.

Activist Cesar Chavez was never prominently featured in “American Pachuco,” even if El Teatro Campesino was tied to United Farm Workers of America. But in the aftermath of recent accusations against the late leader, Alvarado decided to recut his doc to remove the moments in which Chavez is portrayed in an overly positive light as a civil rights hero.

“I’d never quite been in a position before where history changed under our feet as we were releasing the film,” Alvarado explained. “And then we as a film team had to change for the new historical understanding that was happening live.”

For Alvarado, “American Pachuco” was a different experience from anything he’d done before. “This film felt very personal and a little bit like I was exposing my personal story,” he said. Alvarado’s father migrated from Mexico to the U.S. when Alvarado was 21, but he never taught Spanish to Alvarado or his sister. He wanted them to fit in and not be othered.

“It had something to do with the themes of this film. If you try to fit in in America, you have two choices: one is you try to assimilate and be as un-Mexican as you can, get rid of your accent, don’t speak the language. Or two, you just say, ‘This is what I am, and that is a part of America is to have this diversity, and I’m this flavor of American,’” Alvarado explained.

The concept of belonging has taken on an even darker shade under the current government’s anti-immigrant and anti-diversity policies that foster violence against anyone who doesn’t fit the right’s ideal of whiteness. “I always set off to make this film about belonging in America, and I had no idea that Trump would be back by the time we were done or that there’d be ICE raids across cities in America. People are afraid to leave their house if they’re brown, because they’ll be profiled,” Alvarado said.

Alvarado said he grew up feeling different than other people, ashamed of his Mexican heritage because of both subtle and overt attitudes other kids displayed around him. It was thanks to hearing Valdez speak as a young adult that Alvarado became familiar with the term Chicano, a political identity that many Americans with Mexican heritage embrace as a more appropriate label. It implies a rejection of the erasure that comes with assimilation.

“When you’re a kid growing up, trying to understand where you fit in, you look for people who try to tell what your story is. And Luis Valdez has been doing that his whole career,” Alvarado said. “Right now, when people are asking who belongs in America, it’s the right time for a film like this to come out and to engage that question directly.”

When Valdez made “La Bamba,” a box-office success that has endured for nearly 40 years, Hollywood seemed to have realized the potential of telling Latino stories. But as data confirms year after year, Latinos remain grossly underrepresented across the entertainment industry.

“They could make so much money if they just allowed us to begin to tell our story the way it needs to be told,” Valdez said. “But that would require certain people to admit that we’re not just another minority. That we’re a sign that America has changed, that we are America.”

For now, Valdez believes that leaving behind proof that no odds are insurmountable is the best way to guide generations to come. After 60 years, El Teatro Campesino remains vital to the community of San Juan Bautista, hosting art exhibits, films, and live performances.

 “Our ancestors have left signposts. Beto Juarez left a signpost. Emiliano Zapata left a signpost. Frida Kahlo left a signpost. That’s all we can do really, is leave a signpost for the next generations,” Valdez said. “The work I’ve done, I hope, is a signpost to say, ‘It’s possible to be a migrant farm worker and still make it to Broadway or be a movie director.”

“American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” opens at New York’s Film Forum on Friday, July 17, with a national rollout to follow.